“Not…weird, no.” Suzuno took a seat next to Emi, lightly caressing her shoulder. “Things have changed far too quickly here for both of us. It takes time to get used to matters.”
“Bell…?”
“It takes time,” she softly repeated. “Chiho cried because of her feelings toward you. It was the littlest thing that made her unable to contain her jealousy, and it made her so mad at herself and chagrined that she felt that jealousy that it made her cry. We have forgotten that she, too, has experienced vast changes in her life in a short time. That was how strong she seemed to us.”
It was true. And neither Emi nor Suzuno had a truly clear idea what was supporting that strength. Chiho was being supported by a firm belief in her heart. That belief alone allowed her to live alongside beings from other worlds who wielded ponderous amounts of power. And it was all so she could remain friends with Emi and Ashiya and Urushihara and Suzuno—so she could continue to share all her feelings, to show affection for what she couldn’t share, to keep from being a drag on them all. And that belief was built on the foundation of her feelings for Maou.
“None of us was fully used to this at all. Not in any real way. There is still a wall between us and Chiho, in terms of our strength and our worlds, but only Chiho was aware of it. If we want to tear it down…”
“…Only the Devil King can do that. Ugh. This is so messed up.”
“And when it is torn down, I believe we and Chiho will finally be on the same playing field. The instant it occurs, if Chiho is the only one to have a firm belief like that…”
Suzuno turned her face away from Emi.
“What if it isn’t? What if there are other beliefs in play?”
“If there is,” Suzuno said with a smile, “then we will become true friends, with no boundaries between us.”
Laila, meanwhile, was seated outside, back against the wall of Suzuno’s room, head down.
“Emilia…” she half groaned out—and just as she did, the door opened.
“No good?” a worried-looking Nord Justina asked.
“I know”—Laila sighed, her head still down—“that it’s not good to panic about this, but…I don’t know. What have I been doing with my life all this time? I’ve lived for millennia, and I have no idea how to make up with my own daughter.”
“If anybody knew how parents can find common ground with their children…”
Nord knelt next to his wife, taking her hand and helping her to her feet.
“I’m sure their name would be celebrated for all of history.”
The stern-faced father let a slight smile float onto his face as he cheered up his wife.
“We’ll have another chance. Look at where we are. You’re still alive, and we’re reunited here in this peaceful world.”
“…Yeah.” Laila nodded as they left the upstairs corridor together.
“There’s never any telling how our lives will work out. I never expected to be living in a shared space with the Devil King at my age. Compared to that, a mother and daughter fixing their damaged relationship seems much more likely to occur to me.”
“And when it happens, you’ll be together with us. The three of us as a family.”
“You said it… Let’s go back home. It’s cold out here.”
“Say…”
“Hmm?”
The couple looked at each other, halfway down the stairs.
“I really am in a panic right now. I feel like this truly is my last chance. If I let this run through my fingers, I’m not sure I’ll be willing to wander like this for another few centuries.”
“As long as you and Emilia remain your beautiful selves, I wouldn’t mind at all.”
“I don’t want that! I’m not sick of living, but I want to be a human being. I want Emilia to be one, too. I want to treat each day as special, exactly like all the countless families do as a given here, and I want to die at the end of it. I couldn’t imagine anything besides living with you and Emilia.”
“…In that case, now is the time for patience.” The husband carefully guided his wife down the stairs. “I hope there’s something I can do for that…but it’s times like these that I hate being just another human. If I could fight to protect you both, at least…”
“You made me human. That’s more than enough of a gift.”
She gave her husband a peck on the cheek and smiled.
“Thank you, my dear. I’ll keep trying tomorrow.”
“Great.”
“Also…”
“Mmm?”
“Um… Don’t be too surprised, all right? About my…place.”
“Oh? Why’s that? It’s not some palatial mansion, is it?”
“No, not that sort of thing…but, um, I’ll do my best to make sure you can come over in two days.”
“Not sure what you mean, honey, but I look forward to it.”
Their casual conversation disappeared into Room 101. Soon, all the lights were off in the building, bringing a final, complete silence to the Sasazuka night right as the two AM hour passed.
THE HIGH SCHOOLER SEARCHES FOR A GUIDE
As the lunch bell rang and the classroom brimmed with the excitement of sweet release, one student remained unmoving at her desk. Then, as the bell’s final echoes faded, she slowly, gradually slumped over the desk, intractable as a stone.
“Hey, Yoshiya?”
“Huh?”
“Did you hear anything?”
Kaori Shoji, member of Class 2-A in Sasahata North High School, was chatting in hushed tones with her old friend and frequent collaborator Yoshiya Kohmura at his desk.
“What, about Sasaki?”
Yoshiya shook his head, keenly aware of what Kaori was talking about. In their eyes, Chiho Sasaki—fellow classmate, school club partner, and good friend since they all entered high school—had come to classes today with the will to live sucked out of her. She totally blanked out when her name was called during class. During breaks, she either slumped over her desk like now or wandered off to parts unknown.
It gave Kaori so much concern that she asked her what was up at the end of third period. “Sorry to make you worry,” Chiho replied with an obviously contrived smile. “I just forgot my wallet, my phone, my memo pad, my pencils, and two of my notebooks at home, but it’s okay.” Anyone who knew Chiho knew that was not okay, as excuses went. The notebooks and pencils were one matter, but the rest of her lost items were the kinds of things that made you worry whether they were gone for good.
“If you don’t know anything, it’s not like I would.”
“Yeah, I guess. But it doesn’t look like she’s eating lunch or anything…”
“If it’s because she forgot her wallet, you or me could lend her some cash for today…but she usually brings her own bento lunch, doesn’t she?”
“Not always…”
They got along well, but Yoshiya, involved with different clubs from Chiho and Kaori, wasn’t together with them as often. Students usually wound up segregating themselves by gender during the lunch break. Chiho, Kaori, and a few other classmates would normally eat lunch together, and Chiho would bring her own food around 70 percent of the time.
“A bento lunch, huh…?”
“…What?”
“Oh, nothing related to you.”
“Huh? The hell it ain’t,” the off-put Yoshiya replied after being dragged into this conversation. “I’m club president. If someone on the team’s depressed about something, I think I gotta offer some help.”
With all its senior members now gone, the Sasahata North High School kyudo club had a whopping three second-year participants—Chiho, Kaori, and Yoshiya. Yoshiya, defying the predictions made by every other member of the student body, was now club president. Most expected the role to fall upon either the stable, reliable, talented Chiho or the serene, caring Kaori, but Yoshiya nabbed it instead.
The reason was simple: Thanks to his netting a few fresh club members from the incoming middle school grads, Sasahata Nort
h’s kyudo club barely managed to keep enough people to field a full five-person squad for team events. Thus, Yoshiya had four first-year boys and one girl to look after. “You got all those people under your wing,” reasoned Kaori, “so why don’t you just be club president? We can be your two vice presidents instead.”
Chiho had no objections, so that was how things worked out back this summer. The summer school tournament later that season ended disappointingly, with Sasahata being eliminated at the semifinals in both the individual and team events—but they still made it that far in the team competition with Chiho shooting first and Kaori fifth and last, which was a decent achievement as far as club sports went.
As Kaori was recalling now, Chiho’s lunch-eating habits had started to change around the summer period. She noticed because of how boundlessly fancy Chiho’s bento meals became. She began bringing a large box to class around the tournament period, and its contents clearly had extra care applied to them, far more than just a bunch of frozen junk cobbled together.
“Hmm…”
“Shoji?”
“I think I might have an idea about this. I’ll see if I can make her snap out of it before club activities start up again.”
“Really? Best of luck!”
If Kaori claimed she’d do it, Yoshiya was willing to let her shoulder all the burden. Even the younger club members knew that leaving things to Chiho and Kaori usually worked out more smoothly. But it was also clear that Yoshiya’s attitude—completely mindless to put it harshly, boundlessly optimistic to put it nicely—had a positive impact on the people around him. Compared to back in the spring, when figuring out life after graduation drove him half-insane, Yoshiya looked like a heavy weight was taken off his back. Chiho’s sober dedication had a lot to do with that, but from Kaori’s perspective, she wouldn’t want Yoshiya any other way.
At the same time, dealing with Chiho when she’s all clammed up like this couldn’t be more difficult for her to deal with. She had to make her cough up whatever she was hiding in her shell, or it’d make everybody worry before long. So she sat down at the empty desk in front of the still-sprawled Chiho.
“Hey, Sasachi, you kinda under the weather today? Not feeling up for lunch?”
“…Nnnnno, no, I’m hungry.”
The reply sounded more energetic (and self-serving) than she expected.
“Okay. There’re probably no seats left in the cafeteria, so you wanna eat here? I heard you forgot your wallet, but you didn’t forget your bento, did you?”
“No, I did…”
“Wow!” Kaori couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, I’ll have Yoshiya pay for it, so let’s have some curry or udon noodles at the cafeteria. They oughta still have some left if we go now.”
The battle to secure lunch at the Sasahata North High cafeteria was a constant struggle most days, but the school organized their purchases so there was always plenty of curry and udon on hand, often leaving quite a bit left after the initial rush subsided. They both cost a mere two hundred yen, making them easy enough to order even on a high school student’s average allowance.
“…”
Chiho pondered a moment, head still against wood.
“I can’t eat curry or udon. Anything but that today. I’d feel bad.”
“Bad? What, for the curry and udon?”
“Yeah.”
“Did curry or udon do something to piss you off?”
“…They’ve been a lot of trouble for me.”
“Curry and udon have?”
“Yeah.”
“So are you, like, actually the Soba Fairy and you refuse to accept blasphemy like curry and udon for lunch?”
“The udon party. Yeah.”
“Ooh, pissed off by the udon party, huh?”
This not-quite-a-conversation continued for a while longer before Kaori finally heaved a light sigh, crossed her legs on top of the chair, and looked around. Yoshiya was already gone, perhaps out eating lunch with the other boys, and the bento-bringers left in the classroom were busy with their own chattering. Kaori surveyed her surroundings closely, then leaned in close, whispering to make sure only Chiho could hear her.
“You get dumped?”
“N-no!!”
“Ooph!!”
“Agh!! Nh!”
Chiho shot up, causing the back of her head to slam against Kaori’s face. The subsequent rebound back to her desk landed a fairly severe blow to the tip of her nose. The force of the surprise impact made Kaori rear back, almost making her fall off her chair.
And so…
“Um, sorry.”
“Me too.”
The two were all smiles as they hung out in the nurse’s office. The sight of two young women about to bud into adulthood, both bleeding profusely as they waited there, wasn’t exactly charming. The nurse applied some quick first aid, and they were out once Chiho’s nose stopped bleeding, walking down a corridor that the afternoon sun did little to light up.
“So…?”
“I have to tell you?”
“If you don’t, let’s go eat curry or udon.”
“Oof…”
“What?” Kaori gave a confused smile. “Do you really hate them? That wasn’t just an analogy or something?”
“It’s kind of an analogy but not really. I don’t hate them, but it’s hard to face up to them, so…”
“Well, how ’bout we go outside?”
Kaori guided Chiho out to the school courtyard. A few boys from some other class were playing soccer in their school uniforms, sweating in their dress shirts despite the cold. A lot of them sported pants that were heavily worn around the cuffs; they must have spent a lot of afternoon breaks this way. The two of them leaned against the wall at one corner of the school, feeling around for something to talk about.
“If you followed me without complaining, you’re willing to talk to me?”
“I guess you won’t let me go until I do.”
It was surprisingly difficult to find an area in school free of other people during lunch. You might think nobody would be up on the roof, but step up to the landing and you’d see groups of people relaxing or playing cards to avoid any snooping faculty. The competition for space was intense. The more specialized rooms, like the computer lab and home ec department, tended to get taken up by the clubs and other groups that used them a lot. In a season like this, it was much easier to find solitude outside.
“Whew… I dunno where to begin…”
“Well? Who is it? That guy from work?”
“Kao?! I haven’t even said anything…!”
Having Kaori drive into the very heart of her issues before she could even formulate an introduction made Chiho physically leap into the air. It also made her realize there was no trying to dodge the question now. She fell to her knees on the landing, cowering down. Kaori had visited her at the Hatagaya MgRonald several times, even talking with “that guy from work” at least once, but Chiho hadn’t told her much else about the workplace. She wasn’t expecting such a pinpoint diagnosis.
“Ah, it’s easy to work out my stuff with you, Sasachi. As far as what I could figure out, I was expecting to make you confess to it and beg for mercy as we were having curry or udon, but…”
“What kind of scenario is that?” Chiho attempted to complain, even as she realized that, given Kaori’s experience, maybe her guess wasn’t so out of the blue after all. “Lemme just say, though, I wasn’t dumped or anything.”
“Okay, so what is it, then?”
“…Um.” Chiho chose her words carefully. “I wasn’t dumped…but I kind of lost my temper.”
“Lost your temper?”
“Yeah… Um, it was nothing…but between that nothing, a whole ton of stuff happened, and it felt like it threw everything up in the air for me.”
“‘A whole ton’ sounds like a lot. And if you say there was nothing and it made you lose your temper, that sounds a lot like you’ve been dating that guy for a while, but now you’re angry because he won
’t, like, go to the next step with you.”
“N-no!” Chiho hurriedly replied. “It’s not that! We aren’t dating or anything!”
“You aren’t? What was this guy’s name again? He had kind of a weird one.”
“Maou.”
“Maou. Was that it?” Kaori shrugged. “It usually takes me a few repetitions before I remember someone’s name. So why’re you going on about nothing if you aren’t even dating? Do those fancy bentos you had in the summertime have anything to do with it?”
“You noticed that?” Chiho asked, surprised.
“Well, yeah, they’re totally a step above the rest of the class. Bigger, too.”
“…Yeah, I gained some weight for a while thanks to that.”
“Oh? Well, that’s interesting.”
Once the ice was broken and Chiho was ready to talk, she found Kaori’s friendly tone irresistibly comforting.
The whole reason Chiho began bringing food to Room 201 of Villa Rosa Sasazuka was because Suzuno, who moved in that summer, started hanging out there all the time. Thanks to the mistaken notion that Suzuno might be falling for Maou as well, Chiho was suddenly burning to do something about it—but the new girl’s cooking skills were admittedly far beyond the realm a high schooler like herself could reach. Taking the normal approach wouldn’t be enough to overtake her, so for the first time in her life, Chiho undertook a crash course in finer cuisine.
Her mother, of course, saw through this almost immediately. She even told her father. He had mixed feelings about it, but her mother approved—“it saves me from thinking up a new menu every day,” she said—and she wound up teaching her daughter quite a bit.
This marked the beginning of Chiho’s demonic food donations, and truthfully speaking, her dishes took up maybe a third of all the food on the table at Devil’s Castle. She underwent a long trial-and-error process at first, in search of a way to win out against Suzuno, and that often led to taking on more than she could handle in the kitchen and failing spectacularly.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 13 Page 11
